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Comment by bitcharmer | Hacker News Reader

I do a lot of systems engineering-level work on Linux and was surprised to see this title. The paper talks about how corporations behind commercial operating systems exploit their position and suppress user choice and use other shady tactics.

The title of this paper is a bit inaccurate it should at least say "... commercial operating systems".

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I recall a moment in history when ffmpeg had some infighting and some dinguses forked off, followed by Ubuntu moving packages over from ffmpeg to said fork in its repos because the package maintainer was one of the dinguses.

So no, Linux is not innocent of the crime of corralling users towards its own interests.

EDIT: Was the distro Debian? It's so long ago my memory is foggy, but it was one of the two.

There is a difference between "not allowing any choice" and "changing packages in the default repository".

It was Debian, with libav. Presumably Ubuntu followed suit, as they tend to.

Operating system vendors would refer to the actual subject

And how would you define "commercial operating system"? Is Android one or is it "Linux"?

A finer distinction would be "closed-source operating system".

There is nothing wrong selling a Linux-based OS/distribution.

No; and No.

Anything that is not licensed as "Free Software" or "Open-Source software" is "Commercial Operating System".

How does Red Hat Enterprise Linux fit into that classification? It's both commercial and open source.

That is not "Linux".

Linux can be commercial, look at RHEL, SuSE, Ubuntu. The moniker you're looking for is proprietary.

They're far more than Linux, in the sense that a product using Sqlite isn't "Sqlite".

Commercial has to make money somehow, directly or indirectly. Plenty of software has been released gratis over the years under proprietary licenses.

Replace commercial with non open source.

* proprietary

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